Mary Kubica’s book is like a long fever dream. She utilizes two plot threads—a past and a present one—and slowly draws them together. In the present, we meet Jessie, who is keeping a sleepless vigil by her mother’s deathbed in the hospital. Then we are taken back in time 20 years where we meet Eden, a woman with a beautiful new home and a handsome new husband, but an unhappy heart. She wants nothing more than a house full of kids, but she can’t seem to get pregnant. Eden’s frustrations are only multiplied after meeting her pregnant neighbor, a woman who already has two kids in tow and a neglectful and uninterested parenting style.

Back at the hospital, Jessie takes a sleeping pill and lies down in the bed next to her mother’s. When she wakes up, her mother is dead. Readers then accompany Jessie on her sleepless journey through life as she prepares her mother’s home for sale, finds a new place to live, and applies to school—only to discover that she doesn’t exist. Jessie’s identity, on paper at least, seems to be fake, which of course gets in the way of many, many things she needs and wants to do and raises quite a few questions about where she came from. The most disturbing parts of the book follow Jessie in her growing sleepless state as she starts to hallucinate—or does she?

In Eden’s story, we see her growing desperation as she plunges deep into fertility treatments, putting her and her husband in debt and, eventually, driving a wedge between the two. Eden gets a job at the local hospital where she spends all her free time looking through the window of the hospital nursery.

Both women are on frustrating quests—Jessie for her identity, Eden for a child—that seem to be hopeless. How these two stories meet I am going to leave to the reader to discover, as Kubica’s story is full of twists and surprises. This is an elegiac novel about grief—grief over losing a parent, grief over wanting a child. Jessie and Eden get inside your brain and take a seat. Good luck dislodging them after you finish the book.